Upgrading My PC

[Darkcrafter]

If it was just FL Studio, but the same happens with offline multithreaded audio processing, I could post a video on that. That was the last time I bought AMD.

[wildweasel]

If it was just FL Studio, but the same happens with offline multithreaded audio processing, I could post a video on that. That was the last time I bought AMD.

It's entirely possible that audio processing isn't cheap, especially if you're using a lot of layered effects and VSTs. Admittedly I know nothing of your setup, but a professional audio setup isn't generally expected to be light on CPU usage. Have you run that setup on any other CPU before and confirmed it?

[Darkcrafter]

Got to do it, it's a very good idea I just had a little time. But here comes the question. Why does my PC lag when it's not 100% load? Maybe it should be that way so even that free 40% is not a big help?

[Graf Zahl]

On a multi-core CPU, 100% means that all cores are fully occupied. Software that can do that is rare, mainly stuff that can parallelize costly background tasks.

[Darkcrafter]

Me stupid. The same issues happen on intel. Seems like real-time audio processing with ultra-low latency is just that hard to handle even for modern CPUs.

[Graf Zahl]

What do you expect? You need some data to look ahead in order to do any processing at all! It cannot be done without any latency at all. How much time are you talking about?

[Darkcrafter]

With my build it starts stuttering at 6ms latency but it only occurs when it reaches a certain threshold of plug-in instances, so the more, the more dropouts occur. And 6ms is already prety close to the threshold when musicians hate it, please don't listen to fools claiming that the same happens with analog stuff too, because of a long distance between a player and a loudspeaker, because no pro musician will do that ever. That's why some of them monitor their stuff separately so they split the signal from their guitar by two: one comes to an analog distortion for example and they hear it in headphones, another comes to computer via an audio interface where it gets processed. Such devices like Axe FX and Kemer Profiling Amp already work with 2 to 4ms of latency (I'm not sure if it's the whole chain latency) but again they're very much limited in terms of CPU power. I'm talking about handling a whole project in a DAW with simultaneous audio recording with processing. I believe they could produce processors with a much better performance per core but that would cost so much more that it's not worth it. I also got my own suppose on why CPU usage still stays low even when dropouts occur, seems like processors only have a limited amount of instructions that audio processing utilizes.

Edit: I forgot to mention that 6 ms is the whole input->processing->output latency.
1 ms with 44100Hz samplerate = 44 samples

[Graf Zahl]

So 6 ms is 264 samples. That's not much. And each processing step may need a bit of advance data to know what it's doing. I don't really think it's a CPU performance problem you are facing, it's far more of an issue with data throughput, because the amount of data you need in advance increases with each step - it may not be much but it'll add up. And once you reach the stage where one processing step runs out of data to analyze, all the fastest CPUs in the world won't help you anymore - if they have to wait for new data to come in they can't output anything.

[Darkcrafter]

That's interesting to know, thanks! Sorry for being so cancerous though